Web Space Demands Are Causing Web Hosting Companies to Pump-Up 2005 Offerings

Updated on Thursday, December 30th, 2004 at 1:39 pm

If you're new to Cheap Hosting Directory, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

It used to be that taking up space onthe Internet was reserved for the high school geeks, businesses, non-profits,and those who cared for a cause enough to learn the HTML ropes.

In the past year, that has changed so drastically that one large hostingcompany is having to re-evaluate its business model.

“The advent of Blogging and flawlessly-easy-home-web publishing has sent asurge of new demand through the hosting industry,” according to CTO MichaelBrunson, who oversees Zipa.com’s hosting operation.

Today, millions more people are posting content online and don’t eventhink of it. The fearsome HTML programs of the past are being quicklyoutnumbered by non-traditional ways to make web publishing happen via emails,Blog software, online website generators and even instant messenger programs.

“The old quotas of 10 or 20 megs of disk space were nice,” Brunson said.”But that isn’t cutting it anymore. The definition of ‘Webmaster’ is changingto become much more inclusive. Average Internet users are demanding web spacefor everything from posting family photo albums to backing up their computers.We’re talking about gigabytes of space now, not megabytes.”

While the cost of disk space has decreased over the years, it’s not beenas dramatic as the increase in demand for online storage space.

“Looking ahead, we found ourselves forced to deal with this reality soonerthan later. It’d be nice to stay in the comfort of zone of 20 meg sharedhosting accounts, but we’ve decided to go ahead and bite the bullet andintroduce gigabyte hosting plans that start at $10 a month for two gigs; $50,for 10 gigs.”

A gigabyte, of course, is 1,000 times the size of a megabyte.

“It’s a lot of space from the traditional mindset of the hostingcommunity, but it’s about on target for what the average Internet user isgoing to start expecting,” Brunson said. ” It’s like getting a dedicatedserver for the cost and ease of shared hosting.”

For industry insight and comments, Michael Brunson can be reached at(504) 274-2144 or Brunson@zipa.com